But will California please take Nancy Pelosi when they go?
Our Founding Fathers gave us a republic actually, but only if we could "keep it" (per Ben Franklin). In short, it was acknowledged from the very beginning that we had a "high maintenance" government and we have not been maintaining it properly.
As to the issue of illegals, we may not be quite so far apart - blaming them for coming with such a sweet rewards is rather dumb. I would posit it is not too late to start going after the employers (cheaper employees pay less taxes after all). We should still beef up border security - because we are getting more than just folks who want better rewards for honest work coming across.
California already has stricter emissions requirements on cars than other states. Just try and license a car you bought in another state in CA and you will discocer it has to be retrofitted to meet CA emissions standards.
I like this idea! Will you emigrants from the USA to come to your new country without restriction and be granted immediate residency/citizenship? How about emigrants from Mexico? What financial incentives will you offer prospective immigrants?
Will you have a democratic form of government? If so, may I nominate Nancy Pelosi for the head of State?
This is a win-win-win-win solution for California.
1> These measures ensure that California's current power plants will be capable of supplying all the electricity nmeeded for the foreseeable future. There be no need for trying to find a safe place to put new power plants that will either vastly increase CO2 emissions or worse cause increased radioactive contamination from nuclear power. 2>In addition, it will vastly increase employment opportunities in the state. When you cross back into California with your illegal power-hogging bigscreen, you will be met by "inspectors" from the newly expanded agriculture department. They will confiscate your contraband and charge you with crimes against humanity. you will then be temporarily incarcerted in facilites which will require many new prison guards until such time as you can be deported for trial by the ICC in their Somalian facility. 3>As you will be unable to pay taxes/rent/mortgage your home/apartment will be seized by the state. As it is now owned by the state, there can be no possibility of it being foreclosed upon which will operate to further reinforce the rock solid stability of the CA banking industry. 4>The vastly increased payroll requirements of all the new state workers will of course consume the current budget surplus so that there will be no need for any tax cuts - and in the years following, the taxes paid by those state employees will result in further surplusses so that even more state employees can be hired.
Well my tongue was pretty firmly in my cheek on the whole sushi storage bit.
But, I do love to twit those soft-headed individuals who seem not to think things through. Hence my emphasis on uranium from seawater over thorium - as an easier "sell" to the econuts (defined as those who would oppose chipped flint knives because of th environmental impact of the flint chips). My personal preference is that we have lots of power and that it be cheap. For the US, spending a trillion bucks on *building* power plants (to a standard design - with streamlined approval process) would certainly provide an abundance of cheap power and an abundance of high paying jobs that would not be moved overseas. Consider the economic effects of the TVA on the economic development of the area it served. Our most recent few trillion dollars has provided precious little in the way of jobs - and certainly done no favors to the National Guard.
But it seems to me we should consider extracting uranium from seawater as well.
Let's face facts here, if we dig thorium out of the ground we are going to be bringing up more nuclear waste and that is a BAD THING. But, if we extract uranuim from seawater, we are removing a toxic and radioactive! material from the oceans - you know that place where the whales and dolphins live. And if that does not make you realize we need to be pruifying the oceans via uranium extraction, - well then think of the sushi.
Unlike a regular mining operation, not only are we removing that uranium from our global sushi storage facility, but when we use it in our reactors we will be converting some of that nasty stuff into pure energy (helping it to "ascend" as it were). This means that when we are done using it in a reactor - even if we don't do anything else with it, there will actually be less radioactive materials in our ecosphere than before.
more seriously:
Presidential Committee recommends research on uranium recovery from seawater
In a report released on August 2, 1999, the The President's Committee Of Advisors On Science And Technology (PCAST ) recommended that the U.S. consider participating in international research on extracting uranium from seawater:
"One possibility for maintaining fission as a major option without reprocessing is low-cost extraction of uranium from seawater. The uranium concentration of sea water is low (approximately 3 ppb) but the quantity of contained uranium is vast - some 4 billion tonnes (about 700 times more than known terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of up to $130 per kg). If half of this resource could ultimately be recovered, it could support for 6,500 years 3,000 GW of nuclear capacity (75 percent capacity factor) based on next-generation reactors (e.g., high-temperature gas-cooled reactors) operated on once-through fuel cycles. Research on a process being developed in Japan suggests that it might be feasible to recover uranium from seawater at a cost of $120 per lb of U3O8.40 Although this is more than 10 times the current uranium price, it would contribute just 0.5 per kWh to the cost of electricity for a next-generation reactor operated on a once-through fuel cycle-equivalent to the fuel cost for an oil-fired power plant burning $3-a-barrel oil." [emphasis added]
40 Nobukawa 1994: H. Nobukawa "Development of a Floating Type System for Uranium Extraction from Sea Water Using Sea Current and Wave Power," in Proceedings of the 4th International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference (Osaka, Japan: 10-15 April 1994), pp. 294-300.
Source: Powerful Partnerships: The Federal Role In International Cooperation On Energy Innovation. A Report From The President's Committee Of Advisors On Science And Technology Panel On International Cooperation In Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, And Deployment. Washington, DC, June 1999, p. 5-26 - 5-27 (download full text , 1.3M PDF format)
BTW current uranium price is $44 per pound - while the above quote is ten years old, it does suggest that the process is certainly as feasible as extracting oil from shale and or tar sands. And it can be sold as removing dangerous poisons from the ocean rather than adding new ones that have been sequestered deep underground.
Becasue young whippersnapper, one of the effects of ageing is that you can lose the ability to focus on things that are too close. (I hear the opthamologists are pushing a new type of laser surgery that can "soften" the cornea to regain thet close-in focusing ability)
From personal experience - I have 20/20 vision, but when I found myself somewhere north of 40 I found I could no longer read 6pt type because I had to hold things at nearly arms length before I could focus on them. And as a codemonkey, I needed small fonts so I could keep as much code onscreen as possible. Reading glasses can help with that, but they screw up regular distance viewing something fierce (resulting in nasty headaches etc.).
This was also a design flaw in the original Mac. Older folks had no use for the darn thing becasue the monitor was too darn small to be useful for them, and as it was an integrated unit, there was no option for an external monitor.
Interesting thought there - despite what the Japanese did to the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor (and were planning on doing far before it happened), the Japanese also suffered from the same shortsightedness and were building "super battleships" (Yamato and Musahsi plus their unfinished sister ships). Had they put the same resources into building more carriers prior to the war like the ones used against Pearl Harbor, one study suggests that both the Aleutians and Hawaii could have been sucessfully invaded and occupied.
Well, when Ike visited houston a while back, it took over two weeks to restore power, and that involved bringing in additional power line crews from 2000km away. The problem was not just downed power lines, a lot of transformers had to be replaced as well. And while linemen from Ohio were in Houston, Ohio wound up having some serious electirical problems as well (more fallout from Ike I believe) - which of course were harder to fix because so many of the personnel and materials that would normally be restoring the power in Ohio were down in Texas.
So, a determined an intelligently planned series of attacks on the power grid in geographically separated areas could take a lot longer to recover from - especially when the long lead spares for areas in Target B had already been shipped corsscountry to Target A. Power companies keep enough spares to handle a certaiun level of damage, beyond that, they assumption is they will be able to acquire any additional from other regions till replacements can be manufactured.
But, doing that kind of damage would probably require more than 20 nutjobs armed with boxcutters - or even 20 highly trained professional saboteurs. - Unless Tom Clancy was doing the planning:)
And yet these "teams" have coaches/advisors who do work to help the individual team members improve their performance. The team aspect may seem to be nothing more than a way to simplify management, but it can also foster a team spirit. A weakness in one "team" member does reflect on the whole and if the coach/advisor is worth spit, he will find a way to engage the other members in helping to improve the weakest member.
Sure I put "air quotes" around that, but seriously once games are multiplayer co-op they do become more of a team thing - look at MMO guilds and clans. So the game involves sitting on your rear, but it is a team game, just like many more athletic games:
football (American style) games football (soccer) games baseball games basketball games
The point is that people like playing games with other people - not solo against the game or a single opponent. How many solo games do you see out in the big blue room? Golf, chess, and wrestling come to mind - and in the schools, these are still organized into "team" events. Track "teams" go to track meets - while many of the activities are individual, the individual is still part of a team.
Video games have just been a bit slow providing that social opportunity (had to wait for the technology to become ubiquitous), but it is there now. Becasue people do like playing with other people, (game developers included), it makes economic sense. It will not be any more a matter of political indoctrination than the high school coach is for the jocks.
Which leads to an interesting possibility. How much money could be made from coming up with a game that really succeeds as a co-operative e-sport? And by succeeds, I mean to the point that schools would find it an acceptable extra-curricular activity - say on the level of the chess club at least.
rounding errors. An obsessive concern for precision in unimportant matters may lead one into a very dark place involving magazine clippings thumbtacked to walls with arcane mathematical formulae writ large with Magic Markers and strings connecting the aforementioned thumbtacks. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine the correct quantities and distributions of cigarette butts, pizza boxes, chineses take out containers as well as the precise dosage and delivery methods for caffiene and other less legal stimulants.
143K at 5 bucks figure 7 disks per megabyte hence $35 per megabyte plus the useful imprecision of assuming 1000K = 1M, 1000M = 1G etc.
And back when the Apple ][+ was the pinnacle of personal computing (there was an upstart from some outfit called IBM), 143K floppy disks sold for 50 bucks per box of ten - for the math impaired, that is 5 bucks per disk - or $35 per Megabyte, 35 grand per gigabyte or 35 million per terabyte. So, we can expect costs for both media and drives to drop quite a bit as economies of scale kick in.
At least to the point that the media is not punitively taxed to subsidize the folks who "produce" video content in much the same manner as male bovines "produce" fretilizer.
Where is the developers free speech in Shuttleworths vision ? He thinks the users trump the developers, on a system specifically set up and designed to give developers freedom. He needs to encourage the users to hack more, not hide all that nasty stuff away.
The users do trump the developers. Every time. Just think about that for a moment - who do developers write software for? Even if only for themselves, they write software to be used. If a developer writes code they can't use, they rewrite it until they can use it. User trumps developer every fricken time. This is not a "free speech" issue. It is not a "freedom to hack" issue. It is a simple matter of productivity. Not everyone wants to "hack" their systems until they do what they want - and once you start dealing with actual organizations, you are not dealing with individual ownership of systems. Instead you are dealing with something larger, such as a manufacturing/inventory control system for a multinational corporation. The organization needs tools that all work together and they do not want to have to pay multiple full time employees to handle screwups that happen because the software processes were written by a bunch of anarchistic prima-dona codemonkeys with delusions of adequacy.
If you still insist that this is a "free speech" issue, go blog something somewhere or write your own software in your basement laboratory on your own system - Shuttleworth is not telling you can not do that. What he is saying that if you are writing stuff for other people to use, then by God write it for other people to use. RMS does not appear to distinguish between toolmakers and toolusers. He seems to see a system as something that only the toolmaker should use - a very crippling restriction of freedom.
Ah but before you get too comfortable with your government assigned harem - and do you really want women whose "attractiveness" is determined by a committee? (oh wait this is Slashdot...)
But before you get started on repopulating the planet, you have to deal with the mine shaft gap.
Sounds like we are mostly in agreement - that a systemn that tracks locations would be a bad thing. I'm pointing out the major flaws in an odometer based system - from the government's persepctive.
1> It does not allow for lots of expensive contracts to be given out to cronies of the politicians. Note this asshat wants 100+million bucks from the federal government that will be paid to his buddies.
2> It does not give the government another tool to use in controlling their subjects (citizenship is so 19th century... regardless of whether you are a fscker or a raper)
3> I think you missed the memo. The IRS insists that US taxpayers pay their taxes "voluntarily". Your plan would have the taxpayers looking at a massive annual bill - it might cause some collection problems compared to sucking it out of payroll taxes as they do for other federal taxes now.
In addition, you would be turning state auto inspectors into federal agents. That means there would need to be expensive (tamper-proof - high security) hardware for reporting information to the IRS, background checks for the inspectors, compliance testing, and a method for correcting the occasional data entry error that crops up when a "raper" makes a typo after seeing your fscking bumper stickers.
Now you can go on and build this whole odometer thing out and pretty soon you will have a system that only Diebold could love. And it would have to somehow still make sure the proper politically connected companies were made properly rich in the process.
Ok, I'll turn the grumbling off for the most part, becasue I do agree that governments should take care of infrastructure and some form of usage fee is probably the best way to pay for a good part of that. In a nutshell, an opdometer based system will not be politically acceptable for the many of the same reasons that paper ballots had to be replaced by voting machines.
2> Who will read the odometers? How would it be enforced? Remember this is a federal asshat, not a state asshat. While various state agencies might have occasion to see your car on an anual basis now, that does not translate into federal access. Can you say "unfunded mandate"?
3> Reading odometers will not let the feds know where folks are driving. Do you really want a permanent government record of everywhere your car has been within 30 feet available to any curious civil servant with a web browser? How about 20 years from now? How might such a record affect your employment prospects? "Well Gee Top, we'd really like to hire you, but we see you seem to frequently patronize Hooters and that is not the sort of place that our firm approves of.
4> And of course, GPS on cars have already been used to tack on additional fees by car rental companies for speeding. Do you always observe the speed limit? If not are you ready for local governments to be notified of all "speeding" cars in their jusrisdictions so they can give you a ticket as they are doing with red light cameras now?
Sure, one might think I am going a bit over the top here, but rather than talk about how to incorporate "safeguards" into such a system, I prefer that it be an admitted bad idea that should be killed in the womb.
"everybody is a well-mannered urban European middle-class "
That explains why Asians average IQ is 106 compared to 100 for caucasians.
Some folks do belong to a culture that prevents them from taking an IQ test seriously. You are correct, but that same culture actively (and often violently) punishes those who show any signs of intellectual curiosity or any other form of ambition that would get them out of their failed culture and into one that has a future.
Safety would just interfere with adrenaline production from the "tweeting explorers".
Me I'm waiting for the video footage of the liftoff to see if it is recycled V2 footage, or a photoshopped Soyuz liftoff.
"Spaceport Tonga"? Someone did not read enough Jerry Pournelle in the 70s. Everyone knows you put your spaceport in Baja and use Tonga to support your marine research facilities and as a convenient base for your "private" military.
Well, a phone aka "telephone" may be thought of as a Ventrilo connection with only one other person in the channel with you. The connection quality is generally better than with Ventrilo or Teamspeak as it is accomplished through dedicated hardware that has been designed for maximum reliability within a 64kbps bandwidth.
Of course, being a dedicated hardware solution does limit its flexibility somewhat. For example, the hardware handles analog - digital and digital - analog conversions automatically which limits you to your normal speaking rate for data transfer. There is no limit on how long you can continue o yap.
Nah, the mean part isn't putting their own needs first. That is completely understandable. The mean part is the dumping they do before they have the internal need. That dumping sets up the rest of the world to expect unrealisitcally low prices and eliminates non-Chinese suppliers. Do try to keep up.
While I agree with you in general, the China that we might be in a war with does not have a 5000 year old culture. More like a 60 years old - and I suspect that their youngsters would be no more thrilled about such a conflict than ours - less so since they are on average more intelligent (look it up if ya want a citation) and even more aware of the just how corrupt their own government is.
But can you put that in kwh/ton for the joule to kwh impaired? And it really does matter just what the specific waste composition is.
Still, your reply is not without value: Replacing current US electrical output with nukes would generate on the order of 50 tons of "nasty" waste - mixed in with enough other materials to bring it up to 50 kilotons. assuming a specific gravity of 2 (very light!), that would work out to 25,000 cubic meters - or a cube less than 30 meters per side. or if you prefer it would take about 1,000 standard shipping containers to hold it based on weight.
Burning coal for 100% of US energy production would produce a much larger number for those of us that have trouble with scientific notation, and while it is not directly radioactive the amount of thorium involved is equal to one tenth of the "nasty" waste you came up with for the nuke plants - except you assume all that thorium (enough to run "a lot" of nuke plants) is distributed on the winds.
Slashdot Mirror
A goatse reference that fits and you had the further taste to not include the link.
I salute you.
But will California please take Nancy Pelosi when they go?
Our Founding Fathers gave us a republic actually, but only if we could "keep it" (per Ben Franklin). In short, it was acknowledged from the very beginning that we had a "high maintenance" government and we have not been maintaining it properly.
As to the issue of illegals, we may not be quite so far apart - blaming them for coming with such a sweet rewards is rather dumb. I would posit it is not too late to start going after the employers (cheaper employees pay less taxes after all). We should still beef up border security - because we are getting more than just folks who want better rewards for honest work coming across.
California already has stricter emissions requirements on cars than other states. Just try and license a car you bought in another state in CA and you will discocer it has to be retrofitted to meet CA emissions standards.
I like this idea! Will you emigrants from the USA to come to your new country without restriction and be granted immediate residency/citizenship? How about emigrants from Mexico? What financial incentives will you offer prospective immigrants?
Will you have a democratic form of government? If so, may I nominate Nancy Pelosi for the head of State?
This is a win-win-win-win solution for California.
1> These measures ensure that California's current power plants will be capable of supplying all the electricity nmeeded for the foreseeable future. There be no need for trying to find a safe place to put new power plants that will either vastly increase CO2 emissions or worse cause increased radioactive contamination from nuclear power.
2>In addition, it will vastly increase employment opportunities in the state. When you cross back into California with your illegal power-hogging bigscreen, you will be met by "inspectors" from the newly expanded agriculture department. They will confiscate your contraband and charge you with crimes against humanity. you will then be temporarily incarcerted in facilites which will require many new prison guards until such time as you can be deported for trial by the ICC in their Somalian facility.
3>As you will be unable to pay taxes/rent/mortgage your home/apartment will be seized by the state. As it is now owned by the state, there can be no possibility of it being foreclosed upon which will operate to further reinforce the rock solid stability of the CA banking industry.
4>The vastly increased payroll requirements of all the new state workers will of course consume the current budget surplus so that there will be no need for any tax cuts - and in the years following, the taxes paid by those state employees will result in further surplusses so that even more state employees can be hired.
Well my tongue was pretty firmly in my cheek on the whole sushi storage bit.
But, I do love to twit those soft-headed individuals who seem not to think things through. Hence my emphasis on uranium from seawater over thorium - as an easier "sell" to the econuts (defined as those who would oppose chipped flint knives because of th environmental impact of the flint chips). My personal preference is that we have lots of power and that it be cheap. For the US, spending a trillion bucks on *building* power plants (to a standard design - with streamlined approval process) would certainly provide an abundance of cheap power and an abundance of high paying jobs that would not be moved overseas. Consider the economic effects of the TVA on the economic development of the area it served. Our most recent few trillion dollars has provided precious little in the way of jobs - and certainly done no favors to the National Guard.
Let's face facts here, if we dig thorium out of the ground we are going to be bringing up more nuclear waste and that is a BAD THING. But, if we extract uranuim from seawater, we are removing a toxic and radioactive! material from the oceans - you know that place where the whales and dolphins live. And if that does not make you realize we need to be pruifying the oceans via uranium extraction, - well then think of the sushi.
Unlike a regular mining operation, not only are we removing that uranium from our global sushi storage facility, but when we use it in our reactors we will be converting some of that nasty stuff into pure energy (helping it to "ascend" as it were). This means that when we are done using it in a reactor - even if we don't do anything else with it, there will actually be less radioactive materials in our ecosphere than before.
more seriously:
Presidential Committee recommends research on uranium recovery from seawater
In a report released on August 2, 1999, the The President's Committee Of Advisors On Science And Technology (PCAST ) recommended that the U.S. consider participating in international research on extracting uranium from seawater: "One possibility for maintaining fission as a major option without reprocessing is low-cost extraction of uranium from seawater. The uranium concentration of sea water is low (approximately 3 ppb) but the quantity of contained uranium is vast - some 4 billion tonnes (about 700 times more than known terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of up to $130 per kg). If half of this resource could ultimately be recovered, it could support for 6,500 years 3,000 GW of nuclear capacity (75 percent capacity factor) based on next-generation reactors (e.g., high-temperature gas-cooled reactors) operated on once-through fuel cycles. Research on a process being developed in Japan suggests that it might be feasible to recover uranium from seawater at a cost of $120 per lb of U3O8.40 Although this is more than 10 times the current uranium price, it would contribute just 0.5 per kWh to the cost of electricity for a next-generation reactor operated on a once-through fuel cycle-equivalent to the fuel cost for an oil-fired power plant burning $3-a-barrel oil." [emphasis added] 40 Nobukawa 1994: H. Nobukawa "Development of a Floating Type System for Uranium Extraction from Sea Water Using Sea Current and Wave Power," in Proceedings of the 4th International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference (Osaka, Japan: 10-15 April 1994), pp. 294-300. Source: Powerful Partnerships: The Federal Role In International Cooperation On Energy Innovation. A Report From The President's Committee Of Advisors On Science And Technology Panel On International Cooperation In Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, And Deployment. Washington, DC, June 1999, p. 5-26 - 5-27 (download full text , 1.3M PDF format)
BTW current uranium price is $44 per pound - while the above quote is ten years old, it does suggest that the process is certainly as feasible as extracting oil from shale and or tar sands. And it can be sold as removing dangerous poisons from the ocean rather than adding new ones that have been sequestered deep underground.
Becasue young whippersnapper, one of the effects of ageing is that you can lose the ability to focus on things that are too close. (I hear the opthamologists are pushing a new type of laser surgery that can "soften" the cornea to regain thet close-in focusing ability)
From personal experience - I have 20/20 vision, but when I found myself somewhere north of 40 I found I could no longer read 6pt type because I had to hold things at nearly arms length before I could focus on them. And as a codemonkey, I needed small fonts so I could keep as much code onscreen as possible. Reading glasses can help with that, but they screw up regular distance viewing something fierce (resulting in nasty headaches etc.).
This was also a design flaw in the original Mac. Older folks had no use for the darn thing becasue the monitor was too darn small to be useful for them, and as it was an integrated unit, there was no option for an external monitor.
Now get off my lawn.
"Think aircraft carriers in WWII"
Interesting thought there - despite what the Japanese did to the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor (and were planning on doing far before it happened), the Japanese also suffered from the same shortsightedness and were building "super battleships" (Yamato and Musahsi plus their unfinished sister ships). Had they put the same resources into building more carriers prior to the war like the ones used against Pearl Harbor, one study suggests that both the Aleutians and Hawaii could have been sucessfully invaded and occupied.
Well, when Ike visited houston a while back, it took over two weeks to restore power, and that involved bringing in additional power line crews from 2000km away. The problem was not just downed power lines, a lot of transformers had to be replaced as well. And while linemen from Ohio were in Houston, Ohio wound up having some serious electirical problems as well (more fallout from Ike I believe) - which of course were harder to fix because so many of the personnel and materials that would normally be restoring the power in Ohio were down in Texas.
So, a determined an intelligently planned series of attacks on the power grid in geographically separated areas could take a lot longer to recover from - especially when the long lead spares for areas in Target B had already been shipped corsscountry to Target A. Power companies keep enough spares to handle a certaiun level of damage, beyond that, they assumption is they will be able to acquire any additional from other regions till replacements can be manufactured.
But, doing that kind of damage would probably require more than 20 nutjobs armed with boxcutters - or even 20 highly trained professional saboteurs. - Unless Tom Clancy was doing the planning :)
And yet these "teams" have coaches/advisors who do work to help the individual team members improve their performance. The team aspect may seem to be nothing more than a way to simplify management, but it can also foster a team spirit. A weakness in one "team" member does reflect on the whole and if the coach/advisor is worth spit, he will find a way to engage the other members in helping to improve the weakest member.
Sure I put "air quotes" around that, but seriously once games are multiplayer co-op they do become more of a team thing - look at MMO guilds and clans. So the game involves sitting on your rear, but it is a team game, just like many more athletic games:
football (American style) games
football (soccer) games
baseball games
basketball games
The point is that people like playing games with other people - not solo against the game or a single opponent. How many solo games do you see out in the big blue room? Golf, chess, and wrestling come to mind - and in the schools, these are still organized into "team" events. Track "teams" go to track meets - while many of the activities are individual, the individual is still part of a team.
Video games have just been a bit slow providing that social opportunity (had to wait for the technology to become ubiquitous), but it is there now. Becasue people do like playing with other people, (game developers included), it makes economic sense. It will not be any more a matter of political indoctrination than the high school coach is for the jocks.
Which leads to an interesting possibility. How much money could be made from coming up with a game that really succeeds as a co-operative e-sport? And by succeeds, I mean to the point that schools would find it an acceptable extra-curricular activity - say on the level of the chess club at least.
rounding errors. An obsessive concern for precision in unimportant matters may lead one into a very dark place involving magazine clippings thumbtacked to walls with arcane mathematical formulae writ large with Magic Markers and strings connecting the aforementioned thumbtacks. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine the correct quantities and distributions of cigarette butts, pizza boxes, chineses take out containers as well as the precise dosage and delivery methods for caffiene and other less legal stimulants.
143K at 5 bucks figure 7 disks per megabyte hence $35 per megabyte plus the useful imprecision of assuming 1000K = 1M, 1000M = 1G etc.
And back when the Apple ][+ was the pinnacle of personal computing (there was an upstart from some outfit called IBM), 143K floppy disks sold for 50 bucks per box of ten - for the math impaired, that is 5 bucks per disk - or $35 per Megabyte, 35 grand per gigabyte or 35 million per terabyte. So, we can expect costs for both media and drives to drop quite a bit as economies of scale kick in.
At least to the point that the media is not punitively taxed to subsidize the folks who "produce" video content in much the same manner as male bovines "produce" fretilizer.
Where is the developers free speech in Shuttleworths vision ? He thinks the users trump the developers, on a system specifically set up and designed to give developers freedom. He needs to encourage the users to hack more, not hide all that nasty stuff away.
The users do trump the developers. Every time. Just think about that for a moment - who do developers write software for? Even if only for themselves, they write software to be used. If a developer writes code they can't use, they rewrite it until they can use it. User trumps developer every fricken time. This is not a "free speech" issue. It is not a "freedom to hack" issue. It is a simple matter of productivity. Not everyone wants to "hack" their systems until they do what they want - and once you start dealing with actual organizations, you are not dealing with individual ownership of systems. Instead you are dealing with something larger, such as a manufacturing/inventory control system for a multinational corporation. The organization needs tools that all work together and they do not want to have to pay multiple full time employees to handle screwups that happen because the software processes were written by a bunch of anarchistic prima-dona codemonkeys with delusions of adequacy.
If you still insist that this is a "free speech" issue, go blog something somewhere or write your own software in your basement laboratory on your own system - Shuttleworth is not telling you can not do that. What he is saying that if you are writing stuff for other people to use, then by God write it for other people to use. RMS does not appear to distinguish between toolmakers and toolusers. He seems to see a system as something that only the toolmaker should use - a very crippling restriction of freedom.
Ah but before you get too comfortable with your government assigned harem - and do you really want women whose "attractiveness" is determined by a committee? (oh wait this is Slashdot...)
But before you get started on repopulating the planet, you have to deal with the mine shaft gap.
Sounds like we are mostly in agreement - that a systemn that tracks locations would be a bad thing. I'm pointing out the major flaws in an odometer based system - from the government's persepctive.
1> It does not allow for lots of expensive contracts to be given out to cronies of the politicians. Note this asshat wants 100+million bucks from the federal government that will be paid to his buddies.
2> It does not give the government another tool to use in controlling their subjects (citizenship is so 19th century... regardless of whether you are a fscker or a raper)
3> I think you missed the memo. The IRS insists that US taxpayers pay their taxes "voluntarily". Your plan would have the taxpayers looking at a massive annual bill - it might cause some collection problems compared to sucking it out of payroll taxes as they do for other federal taxes now.
In addition, you would be turning state auto inspectors into federal agents. That means there would need to be expensive (tamper-proof - high security) hardware for reporting information to the IRS, background checks for the inspectors, compliance testing, and a method for correcting the occasional data entry error that crops up when a "raper" makes a typo after seeing your fscking bumper stickers.
Now you can go on and build this whole odometer thing out and pretty soon you will have a system that only Diebold could love. And it would have to somehow still make sure the proper politically connected companies were made properly rich in the process.
Ok, I'll turn the grumbling off for the most part, becasue I do agree that governments should take care of infrastructure and some form of usage fee is probably the best way to pay for a good part of that. In a nutshell, an opdometer based system will not be politically acceptable for the many of the same reasons that paper ballots had to be replaced by voting machines.
Ah yes the wondercar that is depending a big honking tax credit from the federal govenrmentg to make it almost affordable.
Fed clown #1: Here is your 7,500.00 tax credit for buying a Volt
Fed Clown #2: Here is your 10,000.00 mileage tax for driving your Volt
Or for those who need it this way:
1> give tax credit for buying a Volt
2> charge mileage taxes of + 2500 for driving a Volt
3> Profit!
No:
1> Odometers can be hacked (turned back)
2> Who will read the odometers? How would it be enforced? Remember this is a federal asshat, not a state asshat. While various state agencies might have occasion to see your car on an anual basis now, that does not translate into federal access. Can you say "unfunded mandate"?
3> Reading odometers will not let the feds know where folks are driving. Do you really want a permanent government record of everywhere your car has been within 30 feet available to any curious civil servant with a web browser? How about 20 years from now? How might such a record affect your employment prospects? "Well Gee Top, we'd really like to hire you, but we see you seem to frequently patronize Hooters and that is not the sort of place that our firm approves of.
4> And of course, GPS on cars have already been used to tack on additional fees by car rental companies for speeding. Do you always observe the speed limit? If not are you ready for local governments to be notified of all "speeding" cars in their jusrisdictions so they can give you a ticket as they are doing with red light cameras now?
Sure, one might think I am going a bit over the top here, but rather than talk about how to incorporate "safeguards" into such a system, I prefer that it be an admitted bad idea that should be killed in the womb.
"everybody is a well-mannered urban European middle-class "
That explains why Asians average IQ is 106 compared to 100 for caucasians.
Some folks do belong to a culture that prevents them from taking an IQ test seriously. You are correct, but that same culture actively (and often violently) punishes those who show any signs of intellectual curiosity or any other form of ambition that would get them out of their failed culture and into one that has a future.
Safety would just interfere with adrenaline production from the "tweeting explorers".
Me I'm waiting for the video footage of the liftoff to see if it is recycled V2 footage, or a photoshopped Soyuz liftoff.
"Spaceport Tonga"? Someone did not read enough Jerry Pournelle in the 70s. Everyone knows you put your spaceport in Baja and use Tonga to support your marine research facilities and as a convenient base for your "private" military.
Well, a phone aka "telephone" may be thought of as a Ventrilo connection with only one other person in the channel with you. The connection quality is generally better than with Ventrilo or Teamspeak as it is accomplished through dedicated hardware that has been designed for maximum reliability within a 64kbps bandwidth.
Of course, being a dedicated hardware solution does limit its flexibility somewhat. For example, the hardware handles analog - digital and digital - analog conversions automatically which limits you to your normal speaking rate for data transfer. There is no limit on how long you can continue o yap.
Nah, the mean part isn't putting their own needs first. That is completely understandable. The mean part is the dumping they do before they have the internal need. That dumping sets up the rest of the world to expect unrealisitcally low prices and eliminates non-Chinese suppliers. Do try to keep up.
While I agree with you in general, the China that we might be in a war with does not have a 5000 year old culture. More like a 60 years old - and I suspect that their youngsters would be no more thrilled about such a conflict than ours - less so since they are on average more intelligent (look it up if ya want a citation) and even more aware of the just how corrupt their own government is.
But can you put that in kwh/ton for the joule to kwh impaired?
And it really does matter just what the specific waste composition is.
Still, your reply is not without value:
Replacing current US electrical output with nukes would generate on the order of 50 tons of "nasty" waste - mixed in with enough other materials to bring it up to 50 kilotons. assuming a specific gravity of 2 (very light!), that would work out to 25,000 cubic meters - or a cube less than 30 meters per side. or if you prefer it would take about 1,000 standard shipping containers to hold it based on weight.
Burning coal for 100% of US energy production would produce a much larger number for those of us that have trouble with scientific notation, and while it is not directly radioactive the amount of thorium involved is equal to one tenth of the "nasty" waste you came up with for the nuke plants - except you assume all that thorium (enough to run "a lot" of nuke plants) is distributed on the winds.